How Nintendo’s Vague Announcements Make an ex-Nintendo Fanboy Feel in his Swimsuit Area: In C Flat
By Bill McDonnell
Ignoring how stupid that fucking tag line is, I think “Curious Boner” is probably the most accurate description. For the longest time I was a Nintendo fanboy. Kind of all through my youth. I had every iteration of gaming technology they put out, save of course the Vietnam flashback inducing Virtual Boy, and the Gameboy Color (since I was satisfied with my forearm workout Gameboy Classic).
As a young man I fruitlessly argued with my schoolyard counterparts about why the N64 was a more worthwhile console than the Playstation, at the same time I was shamefully paying weeks upon weeks worth of allowance to buy single games that in many cases weren’t very good. Things came to a screeching halt upon the release of the Gamecube, I didn’t beg my parents for one for Christmas (which really you should stop doing by the time you’re 13), because I just didn’t feel it anymore. And when a company stops making games for you, when you start to grow out of them, even though you’re not very old, how do you stay loyal?
Now I don’t mean to sound like one of those guys who can only play games with refrigerator sized Space Marines who kill everything in site, because that’s not the case; two of my favorite game series remain to be Harvest Moon and Katamari. Even so, I’ve kind of kept Nintendo at arms reach since 2001. Though when the Wii was announced a couple of years later I remember telling my Sony fanboy friend in Calculus class that Nintendo was going to knock it out of the park, that inferior graphics weren’t a deal breaker anymore, and that price point mattered, as did innovative controls. I was right, in one respect, since Nintendo sold a metric fuckton of those things.
I mean really a ridiculous amount, as anyone who was conscious of the gaming world in 2006 and 2007 can remember how fucking impossible it was to get a hold of one of these things. The “groundbreaking” control system, however, wasn’t fucking groundbreaking. It was gimmicky. It didn’t live up to any of my visions, and was disgustingly shoehorned into pretty much any A-plus title when a Gamecube controller would have sufficed. The Wii my roommate and I had in our apartment very quickly became a mechanism to watch Youtube videos when we were too drunk to leave the couch, and play Virtual Console games.
Everyone can name Wii titles that are good, there’s no question that they exist, no matter what people tell you on the Internet, but it’s been almost five fucking years since the console came out, and no Wii game has ever drawn me in the way that games like Red Dead Redemption and Castlevania have on its two beefy competitors. The fact that I have to keep myself under control when I start looking at what 360 games I want to buy, when I can barely name 10 Wii titles I’d want to play through is shameful. And maybe those 360 titles are by and large sequels or rehashes or other bullshit like that, but it doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft and Sony make me want to give them my money, and Nintendo doesn’t.
I wanted to love that little white box, I wanted it to change the industry (which, I suppose it has, given the rush for Sony and Microsoft to adopt motion controls), and I wanted it to prove that the technical arms race was over and that game quality came first and foremost, but it just didn’t. The Wii did not make a strong case for the (and I hate fucking saying this) “hardcore gamer crowd”, and you can see in some of their press releases that they’re aware of this, and that dominating the so-called “casual crowd” (which is code for ‘people who don’t get summer vacations and have fucking jobs’).
tl;dr: The Wii was promising, made shit loads of money, but ultimately didn’t give me a rager.
So everyone knows that they’re not going to give up, that there is a “Wii 2” (Or Wii-Wii, as I prefer to call it) on the horizon, and just now the truth is coming out. “Project Café”, well ahead of E3 and announcements by competitors. Of course very little is known at the moment save what Nintendo has actually announced, but here is what is known or rumored:
- HD output likely, with the possibility of Blu-Ray.
- Backwards compatible 2 generations, back to the Gamecube
- Supposedly an incredibly easy SDK to ease the process for developers
- A new controller seems likely, and the rumor that it’s a more classic style controller is rampant.
- Some sort of touchscreen of 3D quality is possible.
- The system is expected to be a great leap forward from the Wii in technical aspects.
- Playable this summer at E3, which likely means a more comprehensive announcement at this Fall’s Spaceworld.
- 2012 release is a real thing. Like usual, probably in Late Fall-Early Winter
- Rainbows and tulips and fucking unicorns
So that’s not actually a lot of information. Being a scholar of video games, and also a gentlemen, and also that I started drinking at 11:30 this morning, I’m going to tell you what the next-gen Nintendo needs to keep doing, or to start doing, or to really fucking stop doing, in order to win back my boner, and also my heart.
Price Point: The Wii’s price point was a marvelous thing to behold, and was probably more damaging to the PS3’s image than the PS3’s own price point was, given that they both released at the same time. There’s no question that $250 and $599.99 USD look like The Cat in the Hat sitting on a table next to The Count of Monte Cristo. Getting the console in homes is key to convincing developers that it’s a good idea to build for your console, it’s also crucial to getting that momentum that kept the Wii at the forefront of media attention for well over a year, and if there’s one way to do that, it’s by keeping the price point down. I’m not saying that the console needs to be Wii cheap, you get what you pay for at that price point, but keeping it below competitors absolutely makes it more appealing.
Games Early, Games Often: The 360 proved that there’s significant value to releasing early, getting a whole year of traction before Nintendo and Sony even made it to the market ensured that when all three consoles were to be compared side to side it look as though the 360 had fewer issues and more games. The next Nintendo console is going to be making it to the market well before its competitors, and will likely cause them to rush their consoles out to respond, but it’s important that Nintendo have a steady stream of decent titles to back that up. I’m not saying that its necessary to be releasing A+ titles monthly, or even quarterly, but you can’t just release Zelda on launch and then hope that the shovel ware will hold people over until Mario comes out, they need to insure that the image of their consoles library and future releases doesn’t become this:
I feel like I’ve been at this party…
Motion Controls: I don’t think there’s any question that the Wii’s flagship functionality, the motion controls, have changed the industry. Sony quickly shat out then redacted the Six-Axis controller, later to release the Move controller which is as silly and useless as the Wii-Mote, and of course Microsoft put out the game-changing Kinect. If there’s one thing I hate about the Wii, its motion controls. They’ve irreparably damaged the consoles usefulness by making all the 1st party titles, which are from some of my favorite franchises, have these silly shoehorned mechanics that don’t add anything except confusion when a regular controller would have sufficed. It’s a gimmick. It was impressive and fun for the first 2 hours, or maybe even less, but few titles have actually made it a desirable feature to me. If anything, motion controls should follow the Kinect model and be part of a highly developed peripheral rather than a base console feature. The Kinect puts those controls on the market for people who actually want them, and allows people like me who have no interest to steer clear. Keeping something like this, which is part of Nintendo’s image and also clearly not going away, on the back burner is likely to allow developers to produce more bedrock, solid titles, during the consoles head start, without forcing them to develop for some new finagled, confusing, mechanic. I think that this is likely to lead to better games early on, and less WAGGLAN. This is probably highly desirable to investors as well, as it insures lower development costs and the opportunity for a high profile, expensive, likely useless, accessory at a later date.
Oh, you mean like this?
Multifunctionality: I used to decry this when it was starting to become a reality. I’d like to think it started with the PS2 being a DVD player, but then I remember that the Famicom had a modem that allowed you to make stock trades from the same system you played Megaman on. I always thought that it would detract from development of games and push more “everyday” functions like news, Internet browsing, chat functions, and other media. I’ve since come to accept it with open arms, as its way easier to get my friends to watch a silly video, or to have people be active in choosing music, when it’s not my archaically organized computer, but rather my video game console and my TV, that they interface with. So there are things that the Wii does well. The Internet browser is better than the 360’s, of which there is none at all, and also better than the PS3’s, which is something of a nightmare to navigate sometimes. But then you have to purchase an adapter to play DVDs? I can’t simply port in movies or music from a USB stick or an SD card? Nintendo doesn’t produce DVD players or MP3 players or anything of that sort, so I can’t see why they wouldn’t feel obligated to get into that market by allowing these functions without the need of homebrew. The next Nintendo console needs to keep up the browser development, and add some additional multimedia functions in order to compete in the future.
Online Functionality: Friend codes are the most ill conceived idea I’ve ever heard. This shit is beyond archaic. It was easier to play Command and Conquer over my 28.8kbps modem with one of my friends than it was to get one of these codes and enter it so we could play a laggy fucking match of SSB:B. And then we can’t even fucking talk to each other? I understand that Nintendo was trying to promote in living room multiplayer, but may I remind you that this console came out in 2006? And that X-Box Live made matchmaking and playing with your friends a fucking reality in 2002? Or that the Dreamcast shipped with online support, albeit short lived, in 1999? DID THEY EVEN TRY? The Wii online gameplay is a joke. Plain and simple, its worse than the PS3 by far, and is just plain dwarfed by the omni-present X-Box Live which has more subscribers than there are people in Australia. Something needs to be done, and regardless of how derivative it is, it probably needs to mirror XBL in order to make the Wii’s successor a competitor in the market.
Having this guy call me a fucking loser has
really improved the experience.
Put a Stop the Casual/Hardcore Debate: Let me go on the record here and say that theres nothing fucking wrong with casual gamers. It’s not a God damn disease to only spend a couple of hours, or less, playing games a week. It’s not God damn leprosy to have other shit you need to accomplish. But it’s almost like Nintendo has been trying to alienate the people who put off doing other stuff to play video games, the very people who brought them to the top of the world in the first place. Nintendo’s marketing stopped being in your face 90’s and started being more about family interaction, and games that even Grandma can play. Which is funny because that’s just ageist marketing, I’ve met a grandmother who plays Final Fantasy 11, and has been for years, and I don’t think that games get any more life draining or “hardcore” than that. It’s almost as though Nintendo thinks they can only cater to one crowd. That they can’t produce the fantastic titles that seem to gravitate towards their competitors while still making something that everyone can enjoy. Anyone who has been gaming for 15+ years can tell you that its absolutely become a hobby that everyone can enjoy, and isn’t nearly as complicated or difficult, or insular as it used to be. It’s simply about people finding the right games for them, rather than corporations telling people that they can only enjoy certain kinds of games because of their age or gender (or in the case of Resident Evil 5, racial superiority). If Nintendo can leave behind the image they’ve built the Wii on, the casual, everyone join in (but only if you’ve spent $200 on controllers), perception, and move closer to the middle ground like the 360, I think the gaming world will be a better place. The Wii’s successor is coming out at a time when this argument has had years to ferment, when “hardcore” gamers are no longer the majority in the gaming world, when Angry Birds outsells every Space Marine, and they have to tread that line carefully. The console could very easily become the go-to next gen console for the average, 5 hour a week, user, but in doing so it would probably kill the interest from the old school die-hards, and lose a lot of steam and hype in the process. Nintendo’s coffers are packed, they’ve got plenty of traditional media good will, they just need to prove that they can release a system (Wii-Wii) that’s as much for me as it is for Atlus fantards, and also, for your mom.
I would be lying if I said this wasn’t all so I could make a joke
about your mom and my Wii-Wii
